Voicing

The articulate landscapes of Aeschylus’ Persians

By Simone Antonia Oppen

In Aeschylus’s Persians, Athens is rarely described while more distant Greek landscapes are repeatedly used to portray the human toll of Xerxes’ expedition. I explore how recently uncovered information about the venue of the play’s performance in 472 BCE relates to this landscape use. Aeschylus’s rendering of war’s desecration via description of the landscape may respond to traces of the 480-479 BCE invasions visible from the Athenian Acropolis’s south slope.

Ariadne loquens, Ariadne muta: Catullus 64 and the Illusionism of Hellenistic Ekphrastic Epigrams

By Flora IFF-NOËL

Catullus’s Carmen 64 has puzzled many a critic by its “disobedient ekphrasis” (Laird) of a coverlet: not only does it scarcely describe its subject, but it turns into a long first-person monologue by Ariadne, the main figure woven into the coverlet. Instead of materially describing the artwork to “bring its subject before the readers’ eyes” following the rhetorical tradition transmitted by the Progymnasmata, the ekphrasis gives voice to its central character.

The Silence of the Sirens in Lycophron’s "Alexandra"

By Kathleen Kidder

In Lycophron’s Alexandra, we possess an extended representation of a female voice, that of the prophetess Cassandra. Her prophecies concerning the aftermath of the Trojan War present a radical reinterpretation of the Greek literary and historical tradition, one that reflects both her Trojan and female perspective (McNelis and Sens 2016). Her truth thus lies at the heart of the work, even though her words are filtered by two male voices: the author Lycophron and the messenger who reports her words (Lowe 2004; Kossaifi 2009).

Vergil’s Bucolic Soundscapes: Song and Environment in the Eclogues

By Erik Fredericksen

This paper examines how the nonhuman environment contributes to the production of bucolic song in Vergil’s Eclogues, by attending to the dense soundscapes imagined, constructed, and transmitted by the poems. I argue that the poems crucially link song and poetry itself to the nonhuman world, and to the particularities of local environments. The Eclogues imagine human song as emerging from a larger network of natural sound production, and derive their particular character from representing a bucolic soundscape including but not limited to anthropogenic sounds.